A few years ago, United Airlines had a really bad summer similar to the meltdown they’ve had over the past few weeks. I honestly believe that they missed a golden opportunity to bring back their “Friendly Skies” ad campaign. Imagine the CEO doing a commercial saying that the airline has gone through some tough times but promises to bring back the friendly skies. I think it would be brilliant.

I agree that consolidation in this industry would be a good thing. However, I think the smaller guys should be merged into the bigger guys. Having two power house airlines merging scares me a bit, and frankly, the pilots unions will have a fit. What really would suck in this transaction is that Delta’s flight attendants aren’t unionized. They’d get screwed.

One of the cool things about living where I do is watching the planes take off from Logan. It’s a little more rare to see them land on that same runway.

Today, I saw something I’ve not seen at Logan before, and it’s been years since I’ve seen this happen. A Lufthansa A330 was coming in for a landing when he throttled up and started climbing. He did what’s called a “go round” meaning that it aborted the landing and went around for another pass.

A little later I watched it come in again where it did land this time. It was pretty cool to see.

This is a really sad day for Pittsburgh. Today, US Airways announced they’re cutting a ton of flights in and out of Pittsburgh.

The good news for Pittsburgh is that they’re keeping the new operations center and heavy maintenance facilities in Pittsburgh. For years, the “old” US Airways had their corporate headquarters at Crystal City, VA, just across the river from Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC. The real work of the airline was done in Pittsburgh, including technology and key offices. When US Airways was bought by America West, most of that stuff was moved to Phoenix.

It does affirm my belief that the job market in Pittsburgh just isn’t that great.

I never gave this much thought, but it looks like US domestic flights regularly go through Canadian air space. I’ve seen this in the past without giving it much thought. Today, it’s pretty clear that jetBlue flight 205 from New York’s JFK to Long Beach, CA is going through Canada.

I’ve recently been playing around with flightmemory.com. It’s a tool that allows you to input all of your flights and then keep a history. In the past five years, I’ve flown 64 flights for over 80,000 miles, enough to circumnaviate the globe more than three times. The map here shows just my domestic flights. It does not include four transatlantic flights and two transpacific flights. Oh, there are two intra-Europe and two intra-Australia flights as well.

I wish I still had the records of my road warrior days. That would really show some flights.